Thursday, July 19, 2007

Leslie and I are flying to South Africa soon for a photo safari. We are totally psyched for this trip, but MAN is that a long flight. First to London, and then to Johannesburg, and then to Richards Bay which is along the southeast coast of South Africa. A 9 hour flight followed by an 11 hour flight, followed by a one hour flight. I started thinking that this MUST be about as far away as you could possibly fly from Seattle and it turns out it pretty much is.

I first went to Google Earth and did the calculations to figure out where the farthest point from Seattle was and it looked like it was off the coast of South Africa, near the French Southern and Antarctic Lands. Zooming out from there, it looked like the nearest inhabited landmass was southeastern South Africa. Yeah, Durban and Richards Bay are a pretty reasonable nearest cities to Seattle's antipodal point.

Then I found AntipodeMap.com, which does the math for you and also uses Google Maps to display where that spot is. Not quite as cool as SameLatitude.com, but what is?

Now the trick is to make sure I'm bringing the right camera gear for the photo safari. It's not like I can just pop back to get my 100-400L if the perfect shot presents itself. I need to know now what to bring and then tote it for two days on airplanes and through airports. I think I've got it figured out. I'm just hoping that I won't wish I had a very wide lens, cuz I don't have one.

On the way back, we're stopping in London for a few days to break up the return flight and to see a few sites and shows. Sounds great!

1 comment:

Very interesting post. I stay in South Africa, which means I must probably visit Seattle sometime to get to my antipodal point (I have a feeling Hawaii is closer to it). Have a good flight to South Africa, it is long!